What's New in Microsoft EDU - Back to School August 2026
Welcome to our monthly update for Microsoft Education and thank you so much for being part of our growing community! Topics Teach in Microsoft Copilot updates Learning Zone updates Teams for Education updates Study and Learn agent updates Copilot Notebooks and OneNote updates Learning management system integration updates We’ve loved seeing the early impact at schools and institutions such as Brisbane Catholic Education and Miami Dade College and the exploration of new capabilities like agents. Get started with Copilot Chat, our no-cost AI-powered chat with data protection, and learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot. 1. Teach in Microsoft Copilot updates Teach remembers your classes and settings Educators no longer need to re-enter their subject and grade level every time they use an AI creation tool. Remember Settings automatically saves previously-used Subjects and Grades and carries them across Teach, Teams, LTI, and OneNote Class Notebook. Set your course information once and reuse it, or switch between multiple courses in one click. This means a teacher with "Biology, Grade 9" and "Chemistry, Grade 11" can move between AI tools - lesson plans, quizzes, flashcards, rubrics - without ever filling in the same fields twice. Course details appear as a chip in the upper right of creation form, replacing blank fields with familiar context from day one. When: Available now Teach in your language and region AI creation tools across Teach, Teams, and Classwork now automatically detect language from the educator's content and browser settings - no manual language picker required. Whether you're working in Spanish, French, Japanese, or any supported language, generated content matches your actual teaching language without extra steps. When: Available now Unit Plans in Teach Unit Plans, the most requested tool in Teach, arrives soon! It brings standards, learning goals, pacing, lessons, and assessments together in one coherent plan for the entire unit. Set the unit length and weekly teaching schedule and ground it on your standards and materials. Teach builds a structured week-by-week sequence, maps standards to individual lessons, and places assessments at the right points across the unit. From there, you can refine the pacing, reorder lessons, and create connected lesson plans and assessments while keeping the whole unit in view. When: Coming September 2. Microsoft Learning Zone updates As AI becomes part of everyday learning, classroom experiences are becoming more active and interactive. Teachers are no longer limited to presenting content while students passively consume it. Instead, AI is helping teachers create engaging lessons faster, while giving students more opportunities to participate, practice, and receive feedback in real time. Learning Zone was built to support this shift, connecting AI-powered interactive lesson creation, classroom delivery, and learning insights in one experience. Create lessons on any Windows 11 device This school year, educators on any Windows 11 PC can create Learning Zone's interactive lessons through August 2027. Teachers can create lessons of up to 10 slides in minutes from an idea, standard, or trusted content source, making it easier to bring relevant and customized learning experiences into the classroom while saving valuable preparation time. When: Available Now Make classroom sessions more engaging and active Learning Zone is also expanding to support engaging live classroom experiences through educator-led interactive lessons. Students can join from their own devices and participate together in a live lesson experience, while teachers guide instruction, control pacing, and receive real-time insights into student understanding. When: Available Now Create lessons in more languages This September, Learning Zone is also expanding lesson creation support to French, Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese, alongside English and Spanish, helping more educators create lessons in their preferred language. When: September Interactive lessons in Copilot Teach and in Teams assignments To fit naturally into existing teaching workflows, Learning Zone integrates with Teach in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Teams Assignments, and LMS platforms through Microsoft LTI. Lessons can be created and assigned from the tools educators already use, while students complete work in familiar environments and grades sync automatically. When: Available Now And we're not stopping there. Based on ongoing feedback, Learning Zone continues to evolve with new capabilities that make lesson creation faster, teaching more effective, and learning more accessible and engaging. Recent additions include standards lookup, enhanced image support through Bing integration, new interactive activity types, Immersive Reader integration, and tablet support for students, with more improvements on the way. Together, these updates make it easier for educators to save time, create engaging learning experiences, and make purposeful use of the devices already in their classrooms. 3. Teams for Education updates Learning Activities in Assignments and Classwork Learning Activities - flashcards, fill in the blanks, matching, and quizzes - can now be added directly within Assignments and Classwork in Teams. Educators can attach an existing Learning Activity or create a new one without leaving the assignment workflow. Student progress is captured as part of the assignment experience, keeping interactive practice and review in one familiar place. Students can also create their own Learning Activities from educator-shared resources within an assignment. Share a document or PDF, and students can generate flashcards or study activities from it, supporting self-directed learning without extra setup from the teacher. When: Available Now Group assignments updates Creating differentiated groups for assignments just got easier. Educators can now reuse student groups from previous assignments - select a past assignment, pick the groups you want, and apply them to a new assignment in seconds. No more recreating the same reading groups, project teams, or skill-level clusters from scratch each time. After publishing an assignment, educators can move students between groups without recreating the assignment. Need to shift a student from one reading level to another mid-unit? A single "move member" action handles it cleanly while preserving existing student work. When: Available Now Control when students can undo turn-in Educators can now choose whether students can undo a submission after turning in an assignment. When creating or editing an assignment, set Students can undo turn-in to No to make each submission final until you return the work for revision. The setting can be changed for each assignment, and educators can choose their preferred default for new assignments in Assignments Settings. When: Available Now 4. Study and Learn agent updates Study and Learn Agent is available at aka.ms/studyandlearn in your Microsoft Education tenant. An AI coach based on learning science, it tutors learners by preserving productive struggles essential for learning instead of just giving answers or doing the work for them. Copilot chat needs to be enabled for K12 students 13-17 years to get access to the agent (see tutorial video for exact enablement steps). It is available and pinned for all adult learners by default. Copilot chat now opens with Study and Learn pre-selected For K-12 students who already have Copilot Chat enabled, Study and Learn Agent is now pre-selected when they start using Copilot Chat. Students can dismiss the agent. IT admins control this setting in the Education settings panel in the Microsoft 365 admin center. It is ON by default for K-12 and OFF by default for higher education, where admins can enable it. Study and Learn includes images to “show” instead of “tell” concepts Study and Learn conversations can now include a carousel of relevant, web-safe images sourced through search. Images support the next step in a student’s understanding, helping them work toward their own answer while preserving productive effort. Further improvements to images are planned. Available in 40 languages The agent is now available in 40 languages beyond English (US). Set your browser or operating system to a supported locale and visit https://aka.ms/studyandlearn. Learning activities will appear in your chosen app locale, and you can switch languages during a conversation for a multilingual learning experience. 5. Copilot Notebooks and OneNote updates We’re expanding what educators can create and do across OneNote, with new Copilot experiences coming along for the ride: Share links from Learning Activities now work across OneNote on the web, desktop, iPad, and iOS. When pasted into a OneNote page, these links automatically unfurl into interactive activities directly on the page. Coming soon to preview for Technology Adoption Program (TAP) customers: Copilot Teaching Tools directly in the OneNote Class Notebook toolbar. Want to try upcoming features early? Ask your IT admin to complete the form at aka.ms/joinEDUTAP to join TAP. Copilot Notebooks and Study guide are available to all educators and students Copilot Notebooks are available to all Microsoft 365 Education licenses (A1, A3, A5) without requiring an additional Copilot Premium license. Copilot Notebooks are AI-powered workspaces to gather all your materials on a single topic, chat with Copilot and create Study guide with interactive activities like flashcards, quizzes, matching and fill-in-the-blanks, Mind map, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. 6. Learning management system integration updates Support for new learning management systems Welcome Skooler, Infinite Campus, and Blackbaud into our officially supported LMS platforms alongside Canvas, Blackboard, D2L/Brightspace and Moodle. The Microsoft 365 LTI app is LTI 1.3 Advantage Complete certified so able to support any platform that is conformant to the LTI 1.3 Advantage standard, but we partner closely with these LMS platforms to make sure our customers have a great experience. Copilot teaching tools are generally available Copilot teaching tools are a set of tools available in familiar LMS flows for creating and updating content. Educators can easily access AI-powered teaching tools to quickly make modifications to language, reading level, length, difficulty, alignment to relevant standards. They can also create Microsoft Learning Activities like flashcards, fill in the blanks, and matching games that can be shared with a class as study aids. Meetings keep in sync and recordings view Keeping your current roster in sync with meeting invites is easy – Enabling the keep in sync option in meetings ensures that your meeting invites to the are always in sync with the current LMS roster and students can co-teachers have invites and can join your meetings. We have also added a new (default) option for meeting recordings that allows teachers to explicitly publish recordings for the class, ensuring that all students and co-teachers have access to view or edit the recording and also giving a chance for educators to add captions or edit recordings before publishing for the class. Add co-teachers as meeting co-organizers The new setting to add co-teachers in a course as co-organizers to a meeting allows you to easily give your co-teachers in a course the ability to help you manage meetings and moderate online sessions. OneDrive 2tb file upload limit File upload limit for sharing files with a course is now 2tb, ensuring that large files like meeting recordings can be shared with a course without issues. ____________________________________ And finally, just to recap all the news we have for you this month, here’s a quick review of all the features that are generally available or are rolling out now: Teach module in Microsoft Copilot updates Settings to remember your classes Language and regional settings auto-detect and improvements Unit Plans Microsoft Learning Zone Available as a trial for Windows 11 Integration in to Teach, Teams and LMS Teach in Class mode Standards support New languages Improved images Teams for EDU updates Learning Activities in Assignments Reuse Groups Undo Turn-in Study and Learn agent updates IT Admin controls to enable "pre-selected" as the default 40+ languages supported Image improvements Copilot Notebooks available to all M365 education teachers and students LMS integration and Microsoft 365 LTI Support for new LMSes - Skooler, Infinite Campus and Blackbaud Copilot teaching tools generally available Meetings keep in sync and recording views Add co-teachers as meeting co-organizers OneDrive 2tb file upload limit Mike Tholfsen Group Product Manager Microsoft EducationWhat's New in Microsoft EDU - Back to School 2026 webinar
Get ready for back to school (Northern Hemisphere) with the latest product updates from Microsoft Education. In this webinar, we’ll showcase new AI-powered tools, teaching resources, and product updates designed to help educators save time, personalize learning, and support every student. You’ll see what’s new across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams for Education, OneNote, and more, including: ✅ Teach module in Microsoft 365 Copilot ✅ Copilot Notebooks ✅ Study and Learn agent ✅ Learning Zone ✅ Teams for EDU updates ✅ The latest OneNote EDU updates And more! Join us for practical demonstrations, helpful tips, and new ideas you can put to work as you prepare for a successful school year. And don't worry if you can't make it live, we will be recorded and posting this on the Microsoft Education YouTube channel afterwards. 📅 When: Wednesday, August 26th @ 8am Pacific Time 🔗 Register here: https://df.events.teams.microsoft.com/event/df.8c4f06fc-399f-4603-8023-f5fd92601bd1@72f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47?source=copyLinkOneEventsShareDialog Mike Tholfsen Group Product Manager Microsoft EducationCalling all IT Admins - webinar on configuring Copilot Chat and updates for Students 13+
This IT Admin-focused workshop walks through how to configure Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, from your tenant all the way to the end-user experience. When you enable Copilot Chat for students 13+, they will also get access to the new Study & Learn agent, Copilot Notebooks, Learning Activities and more. We cover the latest features that are available — including the new 13+ student configuration options, CSV, SDS and Powershell uploads, Copilot agents & extensibility, and updated licensing & security controls. By the end, you’ll be able to confidently deploy, manage, and optimize Copilot Chat in your environment so your users can safely harness AI productivity from day one. This 45-minute webinar will be led by Bill Sluss Principal Product Manager from the Microsoft Education team. When: Wednesday, August 19th @ 8am Pacific time Register: https://df.events.teams.microsoft.com/event/df.95feda23-419a-4d99-bfad-f7e4fd52a498@72f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47?source=copyLinkOneEventsShareDialog Mike Tholfsen Group Product Manager Microsoft EducationHands-on webinar: Set up your classroom in Teams for Education plus the new Study and Learn Agent
Join us on Wednesday, August 5th at 8:00 AM Pacific Time for a practical, 60-minute webinar to get your Microsoft Teams classroom ready for the new school year in the Northern hemisphere. Get your class set up in Assignments and Classwork, learn about new tools like Learning Activities, use Student AI Guidelines to set the right expectations for your students, and see how the Study and Learn Agent can be a study partner for your students. Follow along with your own Microsoft 365 Education account as we walk through each one. Register here: https://aka.ms/August5Training The session will be recorded and posted to the Microsoft Education YouTube channel so you can watch it later or share it with colleagues. Agenda - Get your Teams EDU classroom ready and learn about the Study and Learn Agent. ✅ Teams EDU Classwork / Assignments setup ✅ Learning Activities in Assignments and Classwork ✅ Student AI Guidelines in Teams Assignments ✅ Copilot Study and Learn Agent We look forward to seeing you on August 5th! Also, be sure to check out and sign up for our Microsoft Elevate Educator community. Mike Tholfsen Group Product Manager Microsoft EducationHands-on webinar: Teach Module in M365 Copilot and Copilot Notebooks (available for all educators)
Join us on Wednesday, July 8th @ 8am Pacific Time for an in-depth professional development webinar on the new AI-powered "Teach" module in M365 Copilot that is fully rolled out and available to everyone. We will also be covering Copilot Notebooks and the Study Guide which is now also available to all M365 Educators and Students. This will be a 60-minute hands-on webinar where the Product Management team will walk through the new updates in detail and you can follow-along at home with your own M365 Education account. To reiterate, the Teach Module and Copilot Notebooks are available globally to all educators using Microsoft 365. And don’t worry – we’ll be recording these and posting on our Microsoft Education YouTube channel so you’ll always to able to watch later or share with others. Register here: https://msit.events.teams.microsoft.com/event/msit.ed7f065d-57a5-437c-ba23-12b0ef06a259@72f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47 Agenda: How to use the new AI-powered "Teach" module in M365. ✅ Lesson plans and the new Keep Going feature ✅ Learning Zone integration ✅ Modifying Existing content ✅ Learning Activities ✅ Coplot Notebooks plus Study Guide We look forward to having you attend the event! Also, be sure to check out and sign up for our Microsoft Elevate Educator community. Mike Tholfsen Group Product Manager Microsoft Education teamCopilot Notebooks and Study guide now available to Copilot Chat users
Every student knows the feeling: the test is coming, the materials are everywhere— and the hardest part is not finding information, it is knowing where to start. There is a PDF from the teacher. Slides from last week. A Word document with notes. Each piece has value. But studying means turning all of it into something usable: what to review first, what connects together, what still feels fuzzy, and what to practice learning. That is why we are excited to share two updates for education. First, Copilot Notebooks is now rolling out to Copilot Chat users, available with Microsoft 365 Education licenses. Copilot Notebooks are AI-powered workspaces for a subject or group project built on reference materials—bringing together all context behind a topic in one place for you or your study group and Copilot to collaborate on. This addresses one of the top asks we have heard from Microsoft 365 Education customers: bring the power of Copilot Notebooks to the education licenses schools already use. This education expansion builds on the broader Copilot Notebooks announcement that brings Notebooks to all education and enterprise Copilot Chat users, including new ways to work with your own materials in Notebooks with mind maps, Study Guides, and coming soon - the ability to create Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. You can read that announcement in the broader commercial Copilot Notebooks blog. Copilot Notebooks are available in the Microsoft 365 Copilot web and desktop versions for Education users. Expect them to be available in Education tenants in the next two weeks. They will be available in OneNote in the weeks to follow. Get started: Find Copilot Notebooks located in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app waffle. Second, Copilot Notebook Study Guide is now generally available both for education and enterprise users. Study Guide is an AI-powered feature in Notebooks that turns the learning materials you provide into a complete, interactive study companion. Organized, editable, grounded in your references. Ready when you are. For Education IT admins - what you need to know Study guide lives inside Copilot Notebooks. Copilot Notebooks are available in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Copilot Notebooks are located in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app waffle. With this update, Copilot Notebooks are available to Microsoft 365 Education A1, A3, and A5 users. Study guide is available for education users ages 13+. Student accounts need the right Age Group in Microsoft Entra ID, and K-12 students ages 13-17 need Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat enabled by an IT admin before they can use Copilot Notebooks and Study Guide. No additional deployment is needed for Study Guide. Study Guide is rolling out to enterprise and education customers starting June 11. It may take a few days to show up in your account. What Study guide does Study Guide takes the materials learners already have and helps turn them into a collection of organized study topics and activities of your choice. Drop in PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, or Excel files. Study Guide reads across those references, identifies the key ideas, and creates a multi-page study guide inside the notebook. The important part: it is grounded in the sources you provide. It is not pulling random facts from the internet. Summary pages and Topic pages include citations back to the original materials, so learners can check where information came from and return to the source when something needs a closer look. That matters for learning. It helps students stay connected to the actual course materials. It helps educators trust what students are practicing from turns citation-checking into a habit, not an afterthought. What is available in Study guide Study Guide creates materials that span all phases of learning: understand, practice, and test. Understand: deepen your knowledge of the material Summary page: Start with a high-level overview of the materials you added. The Summary includes an overview, why the topic matters, key topics, a glossary, common misconceptions, and citations back to the source materials. Topic pages: Study Guide creates deeper pages for the major topics it finds in your content. These pages work like mini-chapters that cover content across all your references. They include explanations, sub-topic deep dives, worked examples, questions that make you think critically and analyze concepts, short exercises, and citations throughout. Practice: strengthen recall, and make connections Flashcards: Study Guide generates interactive cards from the learner's materials. Learners can flip cards, use hints, and edit the set so the wording matches how they think about the concept. Fill in the blanks: Key terms are removed from important sentences, and learners choose from a set of distraction answers to complete sentences. It is especially useful for processes, and sequences of events where the order and relationships matter. Matching: Study Guide creates matching tiles that ask learners to connect related ideas: terms to definitions, causes to effects, structures to functions, or concepts to examples. Test: check what is sticking Quiz: Study Guide creates a Microsoft Forms-powered quiz with questions generated from the materials. Learners can answer directly from the page, review results, and see explanations for multiple-choice answers. Results are private to the learner unless they choose to share them. Every one of these formats is designed to move studying from passive review to active practice. Not just rereading or highlighting. Actually trying to remember, connect, explain, and check. Study Guide supports 21 languages at launch: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English (US), Estonian, French (Canada), French (France), German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmal, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. That means students can study from the materials they already use, in the language they already learn in, without having to move everything into a separate tool. For educators A few ways you can bring Study guide to your students or use it yourself: Get started by taking the Microsoft Learn course. Available now at aka.ms/notebooksandstudyguidemodule Point learners to a specific study moment. "Before Friday's quiz, add this week's slides and generate flashcards" is more useful than "use AI to study." Encourage active practice. Flashcards, fill-in-the-blanks, matching, and quizzes help your students retrieve information from memory instead of only rereading it. Use citations as an AI literacy moment. Study Guide shows where information came from. That opens a natural classroom conversation about checking sources, verifying AI-generated content, and staying grounded in the material. Keep assessment separate from practice. Study Guide quizzes are for self-checking. They are not a gradebook, and quiz results are private unless a student chooses to share them. Keep building your own AI fluency. Study Guide is built with privacy, safety, and learner control in mind. Study Guide pages are private by default, stored in the learner's Microsoft 365 notebook, and can be edited or deleted by the learner. Prompts and outputs are not used to train AI models, and quiz results are private unless a learner chooses to share them. Get started Take the professional development course at aka.ms/notebooksandstudyguidemodule Learn more about Study guide Anoo Padte is Principal Product Manager for AI in Education at Microsoft.Making Academic Standards More Accessible
Why standards matter Academic standards are the shared language that connects curriculum, instruction, and assessment. When educators can easily access and apply them: Lesson planning becomes more intentional. You design instruction around clear learning goals rather than guessing what to cover. Assessment aligns with instruction. Quizzes, rubrics, and assignments reflect what students are actually expected to demonstrate. AI-powered tools become more relevant. AI-generated content is grounded in real curriculum expectations, not generic suggestions. Collaboration improves. Teachers across grade levels and departments can speak the same language about what students should know and do. How Microsoft Education uses standards Standards are woven into the experiences educators use every day. In the Teach module and Microsoft 365 LTI, educators can align lesson plans to specific standards by location, subject, and grade band, use the "Align to Standards" tool to refine lesson instructions, and generate quizzes and rubrics grounded in standards. In Assignments in Teams for Education and Microsoft 365 LTI, educators can tag assignments with curriculum expectations, build standards-aligned rubrics, and create a clear thread from instruction to assessment. Across AI-powered workflows, standards can serve as grounding data that helps make generated lesson plans, quizzes, and rubrics more relevant to real curriculum expectations. This reflects Microsoft’s broader approach to AI in education: using AI to support educators with useful, contextual assistance while helping institutions maintain alignment with their instructional goals, policies, and professional judgment. Educators can select standards by location, subject, and language. Expanding coverage through partnership with EdGate Making standards useful in digital tools globally requires more than a large catalog. It requires structured, machine-readable data, ongoing maintenance, and a partner with deep expertise in education standards. EdGate has spent years building and maintaining one of the largest catalogs of digitized standards in education technology. Microsoft partnered with EdGate to help make that infrastructure more accessible inside the workflows educators and institutions already use. Through this partnership, Microsoft has significantly expanded the set of standards EdGate offers, especially internationally. Together, we have grown coverage to include: All 50 U.S. states, including Common Core, NGSS, and state-specific frameworks 70+ countries, with international standards covering core subjects, vocational education, and qualification frameworks Hundreds of supplemental frameworks, from career and technical education to world languages and the arts We continue to expand coverage with new international standards rolling out regularly. EdGate offers access to over 5 million standard statements, aggregating and normalizing global standards for consistent delivery across platforms. Their capabilities include a comprehensive standards catalog, standards authoring tools used by ministries of education, API-based access for platform integration, and certified CASE 1.1 compliance. Microsoft and EdGate are partnering to make a select set of standards freely available to education institutions, lowering barriers for educators and developers who want to explore standards-aligned workflows without a commercial commitment. To expand the impact even further, EdGate is piloting a project in 1EdTech's CASE Global Ecosystem initiative, to demonstrate how interoperable, machine-readable frameworks can improve the discoverability, alignment, and portability of learning and credentialing data across platforms, institutions and borders. The CASE format: Why it matters CASE stands for Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange, an open standard from 1EdTech that defines how learning outcomes and standards are represented in a machine-readable, interoperable format. Why does CASE matter? Machine-readability: Platforms, AI tools, and learning management systems can read, search, and apply standards programmatically. Interoperability: Standards move between systems. An assignment tagged with a standard in Microsoft Teams can be understood by an LMS, a reporting tool, or a curriculum mapping platform without manual re-entry. Cross-region equivalence: CASE enables comparing and mapping standards across countries and frameworks. EdGate is a certified CASE 1.1 provider, meaning the standards they deliver to Microsoft (and to the broader ecosystem) follow this open, interoperable format. The expanded catalog we have built together benefits not just Microsoft's products, but the entire ecosystem of education technology that relies on structured standards data. A shared commitment to open standards Microsoft is proud to be a Contributing Member of 1EdTech, the organization that stewards CASE and other critical interoperability standards for education technology, including LTI, OneRoster, and Open Badges. By collaborating with fellow 1EdTech members like EdGate, we ensure that investments in standards infrastructure benefit educators everywhere, regardless of which platforms or tools they use. When standards are open, structured, and interoperable, everyone wins: educators spend less time on manual alignment, developers can build smarter tools, and students benefit from instruction that is intentionally connected to what they are expected to learn. What this means for educators Within Microsoft Education, you do not need to think about CASE or data formats to benefit from this work. What you will see is: More standards available in the Teach module and Assignments, covering more countries, subjects, and grade bands AI-powered experiences that are better grounded in your actual curriculum Less manual work translating curriculum documents into classroom materials We are committed to continuing this investment: expanding coverage, improving the experience, and working with partners like EdGate and the 1EdTech community to make standards-aligned teaching easier for educators everywhere. Helpful links Getting started with Teach Modify content: Align to Standards Microsoft Teams for Education Microsoft 365 LTI International standards currently available through EdGate Request additional standards in Microsoft Education About 1EdTech About CASE (Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange) Have questions or feedback about standards in Microsoft Education? Drop a comment below or submit a request through our Standards Feedback form.Study and Learn Agent: your study coach, built for learning
It's 11 pm. A student is at the kitchen table with a chemistry problem they can't crack, an essay due tomorrow, and a quiz in the morning. They open their laptop, open an AI chatbot, and in thirty seconds, they have an answer, an essay, and a study guide. The thinking didn't happen. The grade might still come. That moment is why so many educators and IT leaders feel a knot in their stomach about AI in the classroom. The concerns are real, and we built with them firmly in view. Now picture the same student, same kitchen table, same 11 pm. This time the Study and Learn Agent is beside them. Patient. Tireless. Knows the material because the student is studying with their own notes. Asks the right question at the right moment. Pushes them to try first, then helps them see what they missed. Quizzes them. Introduces flashcards, fill-in-the-blanks and matching activities. Helps them build and check their understanding. The student does the thinking. The Study and Learn Agent coaches the thinking. Most students have not had access to that kind of support. Potential is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. Today, with the general availability of the Study and Learn Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, every student K12 and Higher Education with a Microsoft Education license can get personalized coaching when they need it, where they need it, at no extra cost. Study and Learn Agent is in the left navigation and works across any subject the learner is studying. It explains concepts, supports writing without doing the writing for the students, gives step-by-step coaching on problems, generates flashcards, runs quizzes, and creates activities to build and check understanding. The agent is designed to lead with a question so the learner stays in the driver's seat. It is available in English (US) and coming to additional languages in the coming weeks. ⚙️For IT admins — read this first Study and Learn Agent runs inside Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. For your K-12 students aged 13–17, Copilot Chat is OFF by default. You have to turn it on. Until you do, students in your tenant cannot access Study and Learn. The good news: Study and Learn is available to all licenses A1 / A3 / A5, and the agent is available from the left navigation bar of M365 Copilot app and in the Chat dropdown at https://aka.ms/studyandlearn. Action: Enable Copilot Chat for your 13–17 student group in the Microsoft 365 admin center using these resources: Full step-by-step video tutorial: https://aka.ms/enablecopilotchatvideo IT documentation: Education Tenant Identifier Student Age Groups 🎉What is available at GA Conversations that coach: Scaffolded conversations on any subject or topic K12 through HED for: Understanding concepts Working through step-by-step problems Getting writing support The agent recognizes the kind of help a learner needs and adapts the conversation accordingly. Soon, images will show inline in explanations to make abstract concepts concrete — especially for visual subjects like biology, geography, and chemistry. Practice activities that stick: Flashcards to learn terms and definitions, vocabulary, and recall facts Quizzes with multiple choice and open-ended questions with per-answer explanations Fill-in-the-blank for understanding how things work, or the sequence of connected events or facts in a process Matching activities that connect terms to definitions, causes to effects, concepts to examples — building the mental web that makes knowledge usable All activities are created with the learner’s own materials, or with just a topic name. Quizzes can also be created using a web-linked resource Students can chat with the agent during and after completing an activity to get immediate and remediation help with the agent still not giving away answers Responsible AI and data privacy: Study and Learn is built into the Microsoft 365 Education environment that schools already manage, giving IT administrators familiar controls and enterprise-grade data and privacy protection rooted in Microsoft's responsible AI principles. Students get a structured, accountable AI experience, and schools get a credible, learning-first option they can deploy with confidence. An AI literacy resource teaches responsible AI use from the very first interaction. Coming soon! Inline images: GA ships with links to images, images embedded in the flow of the conversation are coming soon Multiple languages: Study and Learn has been optimized for and Generally Available in English (US). Additional languages will become available in the coming weeks. Explanation and engagement callouts: Visual call outs for questions, tips and moments of persistence 💡Built on learning science The pedagogy is the product. The Study and Learn Agent is grounded in four research-based principles about what makes learning stick. They aren't a layer on top of the experience — they shape what the agent does in every interaction. Adaptive scaffolding: meeting students where they are by activating what they already know, then providing enough support to stretch them into what's next. In practice, this is why the agent opens a chemistry problem by asking what the learner already understands about molar mass — not by launching into a worked solution. It then tunes its support — worked examples, hints, or step-by-step guidance — to match. The result is a learner who stays productively engaged instead of overwhelmed or under-challenged. Productive struggle: asking before telling, so students retrieve, attempt, and reason their way toward answers. This is why the agent invites a first attempt before offering help, and why it surfaces a misconception as a question rather than a correction. Mistakes become data, not failure — the moments where actual learning happens. Active learning: practice that sticks, with retrieval-based activities including flashcards, fill-in-the-blanks, quizzes, and matching. The agent generates activities from the learner's own materials and lets them re-attempt the items they missed. Learners can pause during an activity and chat with the agent about a card they don't understand — building clarity in the moment, without the agent giving the answer away. Pulling knowledge out of memory, with feedback in the loop, is what builds durable understanding. Application and transfer: giving students the agency to go deeper, apply their learning, or reinforce it with an activity. This is why the agent invites learners to teach concepts back, apply ideas to new problems, and connect what they're studying to real-world contexts. It's the kind of work that builds flexible understanding beyond a single test. We built this with learning science researchers, cognitive scientists, and educators in the room from the beginning. 👩🏽🏫For educators The best way to understand what Study and Learn does differently is to spend a few minutes with it. Open it at aka.ms/studyandlearn and try it with your Microsoft Education account in the M365 Copilot app on a unit you're teaching next week. Take the professional development course at aka.ms/studyandlearnmodule to get a deep dive overview, and earn a badge! Most educators tell us this is the moment the design clicks — noticing where the agent asks a question instead of giving an answer. A few things educators in our preview have found useful: Pointing learners to it for a specific moment in an assignment can be more effective than a blanket "you can use this." Something as simple as "if you get stuck on problem 4, ask Study and Learn to walk you through it after you've taken a first attempt" tends to shape how learners engage. The activities lend themselves to specific moments. Flashcards before a vocabulary check. Matching for a unit on cell biology. A quiz the day before a test, with the agent's per-answer explanations as a self-review loop. The agent itself is a useful AI literacy artifact. Some educators use its behavior as a discussion starter — "notice that it didn't give you the answer? Why do you think that is?" — to open up conversations about how to use AI well. A short framing for learners helps a lot. Naming up front that the agent will ask questions before helping, push them to try first, and quiz them on what they missed — and why that's the design — shifts how learners engage. One small tip worth passing on: the more specifically a learner can name what's tripping them up, the better the agent can help. "I can't picture what's happening here" gives the agent more to work with than "I don't get it." Feedback shapes what we ship next. There's an OCV form linked from inside the agent, and educator input has driven much of the roadmap so far. 🫱🏼🫲🏾The bet For decades, the students who got one-on-one coaching outperformed the students who didn't. That gap was a function of access — who had a tutor, who had a teacher with bandwidth, who had a parent at the kitchen table. AI is the first technology in the history of education with a real shot at closing it. That's the bet we are making. AI as a coach. Built on learning science. Built into the tools schools already trust. Available to every student, not just the ones whose families can afford it. Study and Learn is the first move. Open Microsoft 365 Copilot. Look in the left navigation. The coach is there as long as Copilot Chat is enabled. Get going at https://aka.ms/studyandlearn Resources: Enable Copilot Chat step-by-step video tutorial Educator professional development Support documentation Anoo Padte is Principal Product Manager for AI in Education at Microsoft.Introducing Learning Activities: AI-powered practice for educators and students
Practice is where learning actually happens. It’s one thing to read through a unit or sit through a lesson; it’s another to retrieve that knowledge on demand. But building good practice materials takes time that educators rarely have, and most students don’t know where to start when it comes to studying on their own. Learning Activities is designed to close that gap for both. With Learning Activities, educators can paste in lesson content and generate a shareable practice activity in under three minutes. Students can do the same with their own notes to study independently, or dive straight into an activity a teacher shared with them. The AI does the heavy lifting: creating flashcards, fill-in-the-blank exercises, matching games, and quizzes from whatever content you bring. Today we’re walking through everything that’s available, who it’s for, and how to get started. What are Learning Activities? Learning Activities is a web-based tool powered by Microsoft AI. You bring the content, and it generates four types of interactive practice activities: Flashcards: Term and definition, question and answer, or multiple-choice cards. Great for vocabulary, concepts, and content review. Fill in the Blanks: AI removes key words from your content and learners drag them back into the correct blanks. Adjustable difficulty: Easy, Medium, or Challenging. Matching: A timed game where players match terms with definitions, with a leaderboard for friendly competition. Quizzes: Students generate their own multiple-choice quizzes from study materials or even just a topic description. A powerful self-study tool. Each activity type targets a different learning moment, from first-pass recognition with flashcards to timed recall under pressure with Matching. Because the AI handles the generation, the whole thing takes seconds. Four activity types, one seamless experience Flashcards Educators can create a set of flashcards from lesson notes or an uploaded document and share them with the class in minutes. Students can also create their own sets to study independently. Choose from term and definition, Q&A, or multiple-choice card formats, or mix and match them in a single set. During practice, students flip through cards and sort them into “I know this” and “Still learning” piles. After finishing, they see a summary of where they stand and can retry only the cards they missed. Fill in the Blanks AI analyzes your content, removes key words, and builds exercises where learners drag the correct words back into the blanks. Educators can choose to let the AI lightly rephrase content for better exercises or keep the original text exactly as written. Three difficulty levels give you control over the challenge. Learners get immediate feedback after each exercise: correct answers appear in green, missed ones in red. Then they move on to the next passage. Matching The Matching game generates term-and-definition pairs from your content and turns them into a timed race. Each round randomly selects six terms from the full set, so replaying the same activity stays fresh. A leaderboard shows the top five fastest times, and players can use a custom nickname or stay anonymous. Quizzes (students only) Quizzes are created by students, for students. They paste in their study notes, describe a topic they want to be tested on, or upload a file, and the AI generates a multiple-choice quiz. Students pick 10, 15, or 20 questions and can turn on Practice mode for question-by-question feedback with instant retries, rather than waiting until the end to see results. No teacher setup required. Students can go from “I have a test tomorrow” to practicing in about a minute. End-to-end demo of Learning Activities Who can use Learning Activities? Learning Activities is built for three audiences: Educators can create and share Flashcards, Fill in the Blanks, and Matching activities with their students. After students practice, educators see lightweight insights on completions, average scores, and which specific items gave students the most trouble. Students (all ages) can practice activities shared with them by an educator using a join code or direct link. Students (age 13+) who have access to Copilot chat can create their own Flashcards, Fill in the blanks, Matching activities and Quizzes for independent study. Enterprise users can use Learning Activities to build practice materials for onboarding, training, or personal development. Same tools, same AI, applied to professional content. Where to find Learning Activities Start on the web The best place to get started is the Learning Activities web app, accessible in the education and productivity sections of the Microsoft apps list and at: learningactivities.edu.cloud.microsoft From the home screen, you can create a new activity, browse everything you’ve created or saved, and join an activity using a code a teacher shared with you. In the Teach module If you already use the Teach module in Microsoft 365, Learning Activities is built right in. Select Learning Activities in Teach and generate an activity directly from your content without switching apps. Coming soon: Study and Learn agent We’re actively integrating Learning Activities into the Study and Learn agent, so students will be able to generate practice activities inline as part of their AI-assisted study sessions, right where they’re already working. Also available in Classwork in Teams for Education Learning Activities is also available through Classwork in Teams for Education, so teachers who work primarily in Teams can create and share activities without leaving the apps they’re already in. Any activity you create, whether from the web app, the Teach module, Teams, or the Study and Learn agent, shows up in your Learning Activities home screen. Everything stays in one place. Getting started: educators Go to learningactivities.edu.cloud.microsoft. Select + New Activity and choose a type: Flashcards, Fill in the Blanks, or Matching. Paste in your content or upload a file (Word, PDF, PowerPoint, or text, up to 100,000 characters). Select your language and any format options, then select Generate. Review the output, make any edits, and select Save Activity. From the activity overview page, select Share to get a join code or share link for your students. That’s it. First activity typically takes under three minutes. Getting started: students Go to learningactivities.edu.cloud.microsoft. If your teacher shared an activity: select Join in the upper right, enter the join code, or open the direct link they sent you. To create your own study set: select + New Activity, choose Flashcards, Fill in the blanks, Matching or Quiz, paste in your notes, and generate. Getting started: enterprise users Enterprise users can access Learning Activities at learningactivities.edu.cloud.microsoft with their Microsoft 365 account. Create activities from internal documents, onboarding materials, or training content the same way an educator would. Activities live in your My Activities tab and can be shared with teammates using a join code or link. For IT admins: managing Learning Activities for your organization Learning Activities is enabled by default for eligible Microsoft 365 tenants. As an admin, you can turn it on or off for your entire organization from the Microsoft 365 admin center. Directions are here: Manage Microsoft 365 for Education AI Features - M365 Education | Microsoft Learn. View insights after your students practice Once students complete activities you’ve shared, head back to the activity overview page to see how it went. Insights available today: Students started and completed Average score The specific cards, blanks, or questions students found most challenging We’re continuing to build on this over time based on what educators tell us they need. Helpful links Learning Activities: Learning Activities - Microsoft Support Flashcards: Create Flashcards with AI - Microsoft Support Fill in the blanks: Create Fill in the blanks with AI - Microsoft Support Matching: Create Matching game with AI - Microsoft Support Quizzes: Create Quizzes using AI for Students - Microsoft Support Manage Microsoft 365 for Education AI Features - M365 Education | Microsoft Learn Learning Activities web app Have questions or feedback? Share them in the comments below — our team reads every one.Hands-on webinar: Study and Learn agent in M365 Copilot
Join us on Wednesday, May 13th @ 8am Pacific Time for an in-depth professional development webinar on the new Study & Learn agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is about to become available for all students 13+ and educators. This will be a 60-minute hands-on webinar where the Product Management team will walk through the Study & Learn agent, which is purpose-built for learning. The experience goes beyond just answering questions and instead guiding students through concepts with step-by-step support, interactive activities like quizzes and flashcards, and conversations grounded in learning science. The Study & Learn agent will be globally available by the time of this webinar on May 13th, 2026. We will also be providing links for professional development credit at this session. And don’t worry – we’ll be recording these and posting on our Microsoft Education YouTube channel so you’ll always to able to watch later or share with others. What we will cover ✅ Introduce the new Study & Learn agent ✅Understand concept/question, FC and Quiz, Matching and FIB ✅IT admin motions for enabling Copilot Chat ✅Learning Activities for students hands-on ✅CPNBs and Study Guide slides and demo 📅 Date: Tuesday, May 13th ⏰ Time: 8:00 AM Pacific 🔗 Register: https://msit.events.teams.microsoft.com/event/msit.954c5c3b-cbc0-458d-9739-49e3e8b4baf7@72f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47
